Reframing the International (original) (raw)

Abstract

The 'modern' world from the 17 th century to the 20 th was characterised by the consolidation of an 'inter-national' system, 1 structured around relations among sovereign nation-states. This system grew out of the post-medieval European states system and the spread of European (and later American and Asian) interstate relations, 18 th and 19 th century imperialism, and great Power (later super Power) conflict in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, culminating in the emergence of postcolonial 'new states' and developing countries in the middle of the 20 th century. This system was state-centric in two ways. On the one hand, the domestic politics of states focused increasingly on the centripetalisation 2 of political power within those states into what have been called 'arenas of collective action'; on the other hand, states increasingly interacted systemically with each other, making 'credible commitments' 3 in their roles as segmentally differentiated 'unit actors' 4-or, indeed, credibly breaking those commitments through interstate conflict and war, only to establish new structural forms in their wake. 5 These two dimensions have been seen as reinforcing each other in virtuous-or indeed vicious-circles until the late 20 th century. In this context, the international-or interstate-system has been seen as characterised by hierarchy-that is, which states are up and which are down-and by polarity-that is, how many states (and their alliance formations) 'counted' as structurally significant actors. States were constrained mainly to seek 'relative gains' vis-à-vis each other rather than to pursue 1 Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Political Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 2 I use the awkward term 'centripetalisation' rather than 'centralisation' in order to signal that this process does not necessarily involve a pyramidal hierarchisation of structures and institutions within states, but rather a potentially complex and endogenously differentiated system that is nevertheless dynamically unified around central principles and forms of institutionalisation and behaviour: see

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